Coastal Shipping

Author:
Tim Polson CMILT
Ship Broker
Asiaworld Shipping

An average truck uses 100 ML of fuel to transport 1 MT of cargo 1km. A train uses about 12 ML … a ship uses about 0.1 ML. While these are rough figures, the ratio is about the same as it would be if you scientifically calculated these figures.

Last year 1,197 people died on Australian roads, an Adelaide university study determined that 239 of these involved a truck … This is ambiguous information, but can we agree that having large vehicles travelling at high speeds on public roads is dangerous? Whilst there is little data on how many people were killed by cargo ships last year, we can fairly estimate that it wasn’t many. If a boatie is fishing in a shipping channel and cannot avoid a vessel going 40km/h, we can leave that to Darwin’s law.

Whilst I’m not an expert in maintenance costs of road and rail infrastructure, I’m sure they are significantly higher and more cumbersome than maintaining port infrastructure.

So being an island where about 90% of the population lives within 100km of the sea, why is it that only a very small percentage of cargo moves around the Australian coast via sea?

This matter has been debated at great length in the Australian shipping community. The debate has now reached Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss who wrote a very interesting piece in a recent Shipping Australia publication. The theme was basically ‘the current regulations support a fleet of Australian-owned/flagged ships that don’t exist – we need to open our coastline to more cost effective foreign owned tonnage in order for Australia to have a coastal shipping industry again, hence allowing exports access to lower cost transport’.

So the Government has bought in. What else is holding back Australian Coastal Shipping? Is overland transport so cheap/easy that we don’t need to bother with loading cargo onto ships, then unloading it at the other end, involving truck legs at both ends anyway? Perhaps, but are overland modes subsidised more than maritime modes? Shipping is penalised by excessive red/green tape, ongoing industrial relations issues and general inefficiency, what can be done about this?

And we can’t forget the bottom line: How much more competitive would Australia be as an International seller of goods if we could get our Coastal Shipping network right, operate a hub & spoke system off the main Australian ports and slash export costs the way Australia’s competitors have done for decades?

Looking forward to hearing your comments.

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